Neurodevelopmental deviations in schizophrenia: Evidences from multimodal connectome-based brain ages

Area of Science:

• Neuroimaging
• Developmental Neuroscience
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Schizophrenia involves early developmental brain alterations detectable by MRI.
• Brain age estimation is a novel approach to characterize these deviations.
• Developmental trajectories in early-onset schizophrenia (EOS) are not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate brain development deviations in EOS using multimodal MRI and machine learning.
• To assess brain age gaps in EOS patients compared to typically developing (TD) controls.

Main Methods:

• Collected T1w-MRI, diffusion MRI, and rs-fMRI data from 80 antipsychotic-naive EOS patients and 91 TD controls.
• Constructed structural connectomes (SC), morphometric similarity connectomes (MSC), and functional connectomes (FC).
• Trained brain age models on TD data and predicted brain ages in EOS patients to calculate brain age gaps.

Main Results:

• SC and MSC features accurately estimated brain age; FC features did not.
• EOS patients exhibited larger absolute brain age gaps than TD controls using SC/MSC.
• Brain age gaps showed opposing trends in childhood versus adolescence and correlated with symptom severity.

Conclusions:

• Advanced brain age gaps are present in youths with schizophrenia, detectable via multimodal MRI.
• These findings highlight early developmental disruptions in EOS.
• Brain age analysis offers insights into schizophrenia's neurodevelopmental origins.